Innovation for Sustainable Products

At Dover, our commitment to sustainability extends beyond our operations. We are committed to creating long-term economic value by developing products that are designed to help our customers meet their sustainability goals, run their operations more efficiently, and satisfy evolving regulatory and environmental standards. We believe that sustainability-driven innovation in response to customer demand helps us contribute positively to enhanced resource efficiency and waste reduction while presenting a valuable growth opportunity.

Our businesses are well-positioned to capitalize on increasing requirements for sustainability, safety, and energy efficiency, and we strive to integrate sustainability into the design, development, and use of our products. This includes developing products and solutions that enable our customers to use resources more efficiently and decrease greenhouse gas emissions (GHG)—all while increasing reliability and durability.

We believe that innovative, sustainable products support Dover’s mission of redefining what’s possible by helping our customers and their businesses thrive while reducing impact on the planet. We pursue innovation for sustainable products in three key opportunity areas:

Clean technology

Optimizing use of resources and materials

Enabling the circular economy

How Dover Innovates for Sustainable Products

Our product management and research and development (R&D) teams lead innovation and sustainable product development. R&D efforts are led by our individual operating companies to be more market-focused and better serve our loyal customers. To identify opportunities for developing new products, product management and R&D teams regularly engage with our customers to assess ways we can help them achieve their business and sustainability objectives. These efforts are complemented with internal analysis of potential opportunities and unmet market needs.

In 2019, R&D spend, including qualifying engineering costs, represented 2% of our annual revenue, which was a 30 basis point increase over our previous five-year average R&D spend of 1.7% of annual revenue. We increased our R&D spend partly in response to customer needs for more efficient, safer, and sustainable products. Ultimately, we view R&D as critical to maintaining the long-term growth and competitiveness of our offerings in the marketplace in a world with an ever-increasing demand for more sustainable solutions.

Pursuing Opportunities in Clean Technology

As a global manufacturer and solutions provider, we recognize that we can promote clean technology, or technology that has a lower impact on the environment, throughout our product portfolio and value chain.

Enhancing Access to Electric and Hydrogen Fueling: Dover Fueling Solutions and OPW

The businesses in our Fueling Solutions segment (Dover Fueling Solutions and OPW) offer fueling solutions for lower-carbon alternative fuels, such as compressed natural gas (CNG) and hydrogen fueling. We are also exploring liquid natural gas (LNG) fueling applications. Our Dover Fueling Solutions business provides charging stations for Electric Vehicles (EVs) via partnerships with ABB in Europe and with ChargePoint in North America. Providing charging stations for EVs, as well as other alternative clean fueling solutions, creates an opportunity to reduce GHGs from transportation.

Reducing GHG through CNG and Biogas: Environmental Solutions Group (ESG)

Our Environmental Solutions Group (ESG) focuses its innovation efforts on making solid waste handling and recycling management cleaner, safer, and more efficient. ESG’s waste hauling fleet customers are often asked by municipalities and businesses to both address the need to reduce carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) and divert waste effectively. ESG developed a CNG fuel delivery system to power waste collection trucks that is designed to reduce CO2e by 25% or 25 tons per year when compared to its diesel counterpart. The organic fraction these trucks carry can then be processed to generate biogas. The biogas is then utilized as an energy source for fueling the truck.

Heil provides CNG options for garbage trucks like the one pictured here

Optimizing Use of Resources and Materials

We strive to help our customers meet their sustainability goals by developing products that help them efficiently use and conserve resources and optimize energy use.

Saving Energy and Water: Pump Solutions Group

Our Pump Solutions Group (PSG) offers pump solutions that enable safe and efficient transfer of critical and valuable fluids and materials that require optimal performance and peace-of-mind reliability. To that end, PSG recently developed a seal-less pump solution for its market leading Blackmer vane pumps that helps customers eliminate fuel spillage during fueling processes. In addition, PSG’s EvoClean Laundry Dispensing System supports more efficient use of chemicals by accurately diluting and dispensing concentrated cleaning chemicals for safe and effective use in commercial laundry applications. EvoClean also uses 85% less energy and 60% less water (3.7 gallons per load) in its application when compared to traditional laundry dispensers.

Waste Recovery Through BurCell Processing: Environmental Solutions Group (ESG)

To support the efficient and more sustainable management of waste, ESG provides innovative BurCell Processing technology that helps turn the organic waste fraction into valuable feedstock for composting or biogas. Up to 60% of the entire municipal solid waste stream consists of organic material such as food waste, paper, and yard (green) waste. BurCell’s unique process not only reduces the cycle time for composting by up to 8 weeks but it also increases the energy extraction by 30% when the material is used as part of a biogas system. ESG refuse collection bodies under the Heil brand haul municipal solid waste and, with the help of the BurCell unit to divert the organic waste fraction, can significantly reduce the waste sent to landfills.

Optimizing Energy Use: SWEP

SWEP optimizes the use of energy, material, and space in heating and cooling systems. Heat exchangers transfer heat from one media to another, causing the desired temperature change. But in this process, some of the energy can be wasted – the exact amount depends, in large part, upon the type of exchanger used. Brazed plate heat exchangers (BPHEs) by SWEP are specifically designed to maximize heating and cooling performance while simultaneously minimizing energy loss. SWEP’s BPHEs are extremely compact compared with other technologies. In addition, BPHEs have a smaller carbon footprint, are significantly smaller and lighter than other technologies such as shell and tube and, more importantly, are more efficient.

Cool with CO2: Advansor

Advansor’s innovative sustainable refrigeration systems have always focused exclusively on using carbon dioxide (CO2) as a refrigerant. CO2 as a refrigerant has no effect on the climate or environment, and Advansor's strong focus on developing energy efficient systems provides the lowest possible energy consumption. Advansor offers a range of products based on this one natural refrigerant and produces systems for a wide spectrum of applications including small discounters, big food retailers and cold chain industrial applications.

Enabling the Circular Economy

In an effort to support a more circular economy, many of our operating companies assess the entire lifecycle for products — from sourcing and manufacturing to customer use and disposal. Our solutions help enable customers to keep their products in use longer and shift away from, for instance, single-use plastics.

Keeping Products Going Longer: Dover Fueling Solutions and Markem-Imaje

As industrial machinery experts, we are committed to helping our customers keep their products and materials in use longer. We are developing innovative, digitally-enabled equipment monitoring and maintenance solutions across many of our products, including Dover Fueling Solution’s use of data, analytics, and remote monitoring to improve operational outcomes. This reduces downtime for customers while simultaneously reducing the GHG emissions associated with requiring a technician to travel to customer sites for maintenance and machine replacement. Markem-Imaje also offers easily replaceable modular parts that allow for quick and easy substitution of the shorter lifespan parts within its marking and coding machines. Markem-Imaje deploys an advanced service exchange program for more complex modules that can be refurbished and brought back into operations.

Circular Economy

As manufacturers continue to embrace the concept of the circular economy, we support this important concept for furthering sustainability within our own products, solutions, and value chain. The circular economy is based on the principle of designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems as opposed to the current take-make-waste model. Integrating the principles of the circular economy helps organizations take responsibility for their products within every layer of their value chain, or essentially from “cradle to cradle”—from raw materials to production to use to disposal, preferably through maintenance, reuse, remanufacturing, recycling, or return to raw materials.

Enabling Reusable Packaging to Reduce Single-use Plastics: Markem-Imaje

Markem-Imaje solutions address the important issue of single-use plastics. By providing proven inks and marking solutions that enable coding on returnable glass bottles, refillable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, or on easily recyclable aluminum cans, Markem-Imaje’s innovative marking solutions enable customers to eliminate single-use plastics in their value chain. Markem-Imaje also offers a coding solution, Coding Integrity, that verifies the information printed on products using cameras and scanning technology. This helps ensure that product coding, such as expiration dates, are more reliably printed, which in turn reduces food waste.

Reprocessing Plastic Products: MAAG

MAAG Group systems play a key role in enabling a more circular economy for plastics. MAAG Group serves the entire plastics value chain from virgin polymers to processing of parts to end-of-life recycling, giving it deep insight into how its products can enable the effective return of used plastics material into high quality products. MAAG Group’s recycling processing solutions address the technical challenges posed by working with often highly contaminated used plastics material streams, including filtration technologies that remove contaminants such as paper, metal, or wood from used plastics and color control systems for recycled plastic pellets. For example, MAAG Group’s ETTLINGER’s melt filters allow recyclers to more efficiently remove contaminants from highly contaminated loads of used plastics with a reduced loss of material compared to alternative solutions. MAAG Group’s product portfolio of pelletizers, dryers, pulverizes, and melt pumps are used in a wide variety of applications that support closing the loop for plastic materials.